MichaelZimmer.org

Joining Marquette University’s New Department of Computer Science

Michael Zimmer — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 16:15:11 +0000

I’m excited to announce that starting in August 2019, I will be joining the faculty of the new Department of Computer Science at Marquette University. After over 10 years at UW-Milwaukee, I’m really looking forward to this new direction in my academic career.

Currently housed in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at Marquette, the computer science faculty recently received approval to create an independent Department of Computer Science, launching in August 2019. This new Department of Computer Science will be centered around a vision to build a strong research and teaching environment for preparing innovation leaders to meet the computing challenges and demands of the 21st century.

I am really looking forward to contributing my research and teaching expertise in areas of digital privacy and data ethics to help the department fulfill its mission.

I also look forward to potential collaborations across the Marquette Campus, including the Law School, the College of Communication’s digital media faculty, and the ethics faculty in the Department of Philosophy. Marquette’s leadership in the newly announced Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute provides another valuable opprotunity to contribute to the growing focus on data science in Milwaukee. And certainly, my strong commitment to service and public advocacy aligns with the broader mission and Jesuit values of Marquette University.

The Department offers a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science, and a professional terminal M.S. degree in Computing, with strong focus areas in data science, cyber security, and bioinformatics.

The Department will also be launching a revamped PhD in Computer Science, providing a flexible curriculum under an interdisciplinary “big tent” approach to computer science research. I look forward to welcoming doctoral students interested in data ethics, human-computer interaction, and related explorations into the ethical, legal, and social implications of computing and information technologies.

I will be joining 9 computer science faculty who are highly productive, nationally and internationally recognized scholars. The Department is also seeking two new assistant professors and a postdoctoral fellow in data science. Please join me in this new adventure!

New Book in the Information Society Series: Weaving the Dark Web

Michael Zimmer — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 16:15:32 +0000

I’m excited to share the newest book published in the “Information Society Series” at MIT Press that I co-edit with Laura DeNardis.

Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P

by Robert Gehl

Summary
An exploration of the Dark Web—websites accessible only with special routing software—that examines the history of three anonymizing networks, Freenet, Tor, and I2P.

The term “Dark Web” conjures up drug markets, unregulated gun sales, stolen credit cards. But, as Robert Gehl points out in Weaving the Dark Web, for each of these illegitimate uses, there are other, legitimate ones: the New York Times’s anonymous whistleblowing system, for example, and the use of encryption by political dissidents. Defining the Dark Web straightforwardly as websites that can be accessed only with special routing software, and noting the frequent use of “legitimate” and its variations by users, journalists, and law enforcement to describe Dark Web practices (judging them “legit” or “sh!t”), Gehl uses the concept of legitimacy as a window into the Dark Web. He does so by examining the history of three Dark Web systems: Freenet, Tor, and I2P. Gehl presents three distinct meanings of legitimate: legitimate force, or the state’s claim to a monopoly on violence; organizational propriety; and authenticity. He explores how Freenet, Tor, and I2P grappled with these different meanings, and then discusses each form of legitimacy in detail by examining Dark Web markets, search engines, and social networking sites. Finally, taking a broader view of the Dark Web, Gehl argues for the value of anonymous political speech in a time of ubiquitous surveillance. If we shut down the Dark Web, he argues, we lose a valuable channel for dissent.

Project Report: “Library Values & Privacy in our National Digital Strategies: Field guides, Convenings, and Conversations”

Michael Zimmer — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 22:47:59 +0000

Over at the Center for Information Policy Research, we’ve posted the final report for the IMLS-funded project “Library Values & Privacy in our National Digital Strategies: Field guides, Convenings, and Conversations” which I’ve been working on over the past year with Bonnie Tijerina at Data & Society.

From the report’s introduction:

The UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research, in partnership with Data & Society, along with the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom and the New York Public Library, was awarded a National Leadership Grants for Libraries award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for the project “Library Values & Privacy in our National Digital Strategies: Field guides, Convenings, and Conversations.” A series of gatherings were held throughout 2017-2018 that brought together library practitioners, privacy advocates, and technology experts to discuss and debate a national roadmap for a digital privacy strategy for libraries. The culminating event — the Library Values and Privacy Summit — was held in New York City bringing together privacy experts from within and outside libraries and sparked discussions on key privacy-related issues and possible paths forward.

You can download the report here.

How Contextual Integrity can help us with Research Ethics in Pervasive Data

Michael Zimmer — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 21:44:53 +0000

(I posted this earlier today on the PERVADE (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research) team’s Medium channel)

The growth of research projects relying on pervasive data — big datasets about people’s lives and activities that can be collected without them knowing — are testing the ethical frameworks and assumptions traditionally used by researchers and ethical review boards to ensure adequate protection of human subjects.

For more than a decade, researchers interacting with pervasive data have crafted novel projects and methodologies, while generating considerable ethical controversies. For example:

In 2006, AOL released over 20 million search queries from 658,000 users to the public in an attempt to support academic research on search engine usage, resulting in individual users being re-identified based on an analysis of their search activities.
In 2008, Harvard researchers released the first wave of their “Tastes, Ties and Time” dataset comprising of four years’ worth of complete Facebook profile data harvested from the accounts of an entire cohort of 1,700 college students, spurring concerns about confidentiality and the lack of consent.
In 2010, Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer turned independent researcher, exploited a weakness in Facebook’s architecture to amass a database of names, fan pages, and lists of friends for 215 million public Facebook accounts which he planned to make public. Under legal pressure from Facebook, Warden ultimately destroyed the database.
In 2014, academic researchers, in partnership with Facebook, sparked an uproar when they altered the emotional content within the news feeds of nearly 700,000 Facebook users to study the impact on users’ mood.
In 2016, a group of Danish researchers were criticized after they publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender, location, what kind of relationship (or sex) they’re interested in, personality traits, and answers to thousands of personal profiling questions.
In 2018, news of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal broke, revealing how personally identifiable information of 87 million Facebook users was improperly harvested in 2014 in order to build psychographic profiles for targeted political advertising.
And just this week, a study of how teams use collaborative platforms was released, where Dropbox gave researchers access to project-folder-related data over a two-year period from about 400,000 users across 1,000 universities.

In each of these examples, researchers hoped to advance our understanding of a phenomenon by analyzing — and in some cases publicly sharing — large collections of pervasive data they considered freely available for analysis. Yet, in each case, controversies about the ethics behind such pervasive data-based projects quickly surfaced. Many of the basic tenets of research ethics — such as protecting the privacy of subjects, obtaining informed consent, maintaining the confidentiality of any data collected, and minimizing harm — appeared to be deficient in the researchers’ methodological protocols.

Over the course of this same decade, a growing number of scholars and advocates have made strides to address many of these ethical lapses, typically working within the domains of internet research ethics and data ethics. Regulatory authorities responsible for the oversight of human subject research are starting to confront the myriad of ethical concerns pervasive data research brings to light, and numerous scholarly associations have drafted ethical guidelines for internet research, including the American Psychological Association’s Advisory Group on Conducting Research on the Internet, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Ethics Working Group, and the ACM’s SIGCHI Research Ethics Committee.

Yet, even with this increased attention and guidance surrounding research ethics, significant gaps in our understanding and practices persist. Across the research community — as glaringly evident in the examples provided above — there is considerable disagreement over basic research ethics questions and policies, such as what constitutes “public” data, is informed consent necessary when dealing with “found data” or when a platform’s terms of service might allow sharing data with researchers, and even at what stage does computational research become human subjects research requiring particular ethical protection. Given all this, there is great uncertainty among the research community on how to address research ethics in the realm of pervasive data.

This uncertainty, however, does not need to lead to paralysis. In the conclusion of our book, Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts, Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda and I note how:

ethically-informed research practices come out of processes of deliberation and decision making under great uncertainty, which often may go wrong or seemingly force us towards less-ideal options.

We also argue that ethical decision making in the context of internet research cannot be easily governed by blanket rules. For example, if a rule was established that no tweets should ever be quoted to protect users’ privacy and respect the lack of specific informed consent to research being conducted, this could (paternalistically) ignore users’ carefully crafted public communications while not acknowledge their agency and authorship.

Faced with this dual challenge of growing uncertainty and the need for flexibility when addressing research ethics in pervasive data, Helen Nissenbaum’s concept of contextual integrity emerges as a valuable heuristic to guide researchers.

Contextual integrity is a benchmark theory of privacy, a conceptual framework that links the protection of personal information to the norms of personal information flow within specific contexts. Rejecting the traditional dichotomy of public versus private information, the theory of contextual integrity ties adequate privacy protection to the preservation of informational norms within in specific contexts, providing a framework for evaluating the flow of personal information between agents to help identify and explain why certain patterns of information flow are acceptable in one context, but viewed as problematic in another.

To aid the application of contextual integrity, Nissenbaum provides a nine-step decision heuristic to analyze the significant points of departure created by a new process, thus determining if the new practice represents a potential violation of privacy:

Describe the new practice in terms of its information flows.
Identify the prevailing context in which the practice takes place at a familiar level of generality, which should be suitably broad such that the impacts of any nested contexts might also be considered.
Identify the information subjects, senders, and recipients.
Identify the transmission principles: the conditions under which information ought (or ought not) to be shared between parties. These might be social or regulatory constraints, such as the expectation of reciprocity when friends share news, or the obligation for someone with a duty to report illegal activity.
Detail the applicable entrenched informational norms within the context, and identify any points of departure the new practice introduces.
Making a prima facie assessment: there may be a violation of contextual integrity if there are discrepancies in the above norms or practices, or if there are incomplete normative structures in the context to support the new practice.
Evaluation I: Consider the moral and political factors affected by the new practice. How might there be harms or threats to personal freedom or autonomy? Are there impacts on power structures, fairness, justice, or democracy? In some cases, the results might overwhelmingly favor accepting or rejecting the new practice, while in more controversial or difficult cases, further evaluation might be necessary.
Evaluation II: How does the new practice directly impinge on values, goals, and ends of the particular context? If there are harms or threats to freedom or autonomy, or fairness, justice, or democracy, what do these threats mean in relation to this context?
Finally, on the basis of this evaluation, a determination can be made as to whether the new process violates contextual integrity in consideration of these wider factors.

The first six steps involve modeling the existing and new contexts, allowing a prima facie judgment to be rendered as to whether the new process significantly violates the entrenched norms of the context. These steps help us identify any immediate “red flags” that violate contextual integrity. The final steps of the heuristic involve a wider examination of the moral and political implications of the process to make a recommendation as to whether the new practice should be allowed or resisted.

Nissenbaum’s theory of contextual integrity has been applied in numerous contexts where technological developments have forced conceptualizations of privacy to be in a state of flux, including vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocols, search engine privacy, the privacy implications of cloud-based storage platforms, smartphone applications, and learning analytics.

Considered in the context of pervasive data, contextual integrity is a useful tool for properly addressing the oft-repeated refrains that “the data was already public” or “the terms of service allowed sharing the data without specific consent” when attempting to justify why pervasive data research does not pose a privacy or ethical concern.

For example, my recent article in Social Media + Society, “Addressing Conceptual Gaps in Big Data Research Ethics: An Application of Contextual Integrity”, uses Nissenbaum’s theory to interrogate the ethics of Emil Kirkegaard’s collection and public release of data scraped data from nearly 70,000 users of the OkCupid online dating site.

Kirkegaard, then a graduate student at Aarhus University in Denmark, collected the dataset between November 2014 and March 2015 using a web scraper — an automated tool that extracts data from web pages. After creating an OkCupid profile to gain access to the site, the scraper targeted basic profile information such as username, age, gender, sexual orientation, and location, while also harvesting answers to the 2,600 most popular multiple-choice questions on the site, such as users’ religious and political views, whether they take recreational drugs, if they have been unfaithful to a spouse, or whether users like to be tied up during sex. The resulting database, along with a draft paper analyzing the data, was posted on the Open Science Framework, a web platform that encourages open source science research and collaboration, as well as to the online peer-review forums of Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal also run by Kirkegaard.

When asked, via Twitter, whether he attempted to anonymize the dataset, Kirkegaard replied bluntly: “No. Data is already public”, a position expanded on in the accompanying draft paper:

Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data. However, all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it in a more useful form. (Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016, p. 2)

Kirkegaard further justified the inclusion of usernames in the released data to aid future researchers who might want to “fill in remaining [data]points” such as height, profile text, and even profile photos, which Kirkegaard’s team failed to initially capture due to technical limitations. Based on all available documentation, Kirkegaard did not seek any form of consent — from OkCupid or its users — at any point during the collection, use, and release of the profile data, nor did he obtain any ethics approval or guidance from his institution or related oversight body.

Considering Kirkegaard’s OkCupid study, it might be easy to accept that users made certain profile information available on the online dating platform, and all the Danish researchers did was present the data “in a more useful form”. Yet, an analysis of Kirkegaard’s actions through the lens of contextual integrity provides a very different calculus. As I argue, when considering the transmission principles and informational norms of the context, we can easily determine that the actions taken by Kirkegaard disrupt contextual integrity. And once we evaluate that disruption in terms of the moral and political values of the users, as well as the broader goals of the context itself, we conclude that the impacts of Kirkegaard’s actions are not justifiable. His disruption of the informational norms within the context of OkCupid brought no benefit — directly or indirectly — to the users or the context, and only degraded the values and goals of the community and its members. This conclusion is in striking contrast to Kirkegaard’s assertion that the supposed “publicness” of the data means little pause is necessary when considering to capture and process thousands of OkCupid profiles.

By demanding that information collection and transmission must be appropriate within a given context, contextual integrity can guide pervasive data researchers’ attentiveness to the normative bounds of how information flows on a particular social network or community under study. Thus, maintaining the contextual integrity of those information flows can help us be attentive to many of the ethical uncertainties that plague pervasive data research ethics.

Rather than simply waving the “but the data is already public” or “consent is implied in terms of service” magic wands to make the ethical concerns disappear, walking through contextual integrity’s decision heuristic can provide a much more nuanced — and contextually sensitive — approach to considering the ethics of a particular action or intervention into a research context. Embracing contextual integrity will undoubtedly guide researchers through similar ethical dilemmas in the growing domain of pervasive data research.

New article: “Addressing Conceptual Gaps in Big Data Research Ethics: An Application of Contextual Integrity”

Michael Zimmer — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 23:28:53 +0000

I’m happy to share the (open) publication of a new article “Addressing Conceptual Gaps in Big Data Research Ethics: An Application of Contextual Integrity” in Social Media + Society.

In this article, I revisit the OkCupid data collection and release controversy, where a group of Danish researchers, led by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender, location, what kind of relationship (or sex) they’re interested in, personality traits, and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site. To counter Kirkegaard’s assertion that the “Data is already public” and thus concerns about privacy and ethics are irrelevant, I invoke Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of “privacy as contextual integrity” as a useful heuristic to guide ethical decision-making in big data research projects.

Here is the abstract:

The rise of big data has provided new avenues for researchers to explore, observe, and measure human opinions, activities, and interactions. While scholars, professional societies, and ethical review boards have long-established research ethics frameworks to ensure the rights and welfare of the research subjects are protected, the rapid rise of big data-based research generates new challenges to long-held ethical assumptions and guidelines. This article discloses emerging conceptual gaps in relation to how researchers and ethical review boards think about privacy, anonymity, consent, and harm in the context of big data research. It closes by invoking Nissenbaum’s theory of “privacy as contextual integrity” as a useful heuristic to guide ethical decision-making in big data research projects.

Posts on Facebook and Privacy (2006-2010)

Michael Zimmer — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 12:30:12 +0000

Since 2006, two years after Facebook’s launch and right about when I joined the platform, I’ve been posting on this blog (at least as long as blogging was a thing) about numerous privacy concerns related to the social network.Posts include reactions to the launch of the News Feed, concerns over profile visibility and APIs, Facebook SocialAds & Beacon, and the numerous times Facebook has messed with user privacy settings & controls. Here’s a partial chronology:

Facebook Changes Cause Rift in Flow of Personal Information (Sept 6, 2006)
More on Facebook and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows (Sept 8, 2006)
Facebook Offers Privacy Fix, But Only If You Select It (Sept 9, 2006)
Facebook Allowing Profiles to be Crawled by Google (March 29, 2007)
Personal Data Flows and APIs (May 25, 2007)
Facebook to Join Behavioral Targeting Game, and Might Win (Sept 7, 2007)
Bill McGeveran on Facebook, Context, and Privacy (Sept 17, 2007)
Link Roundup on Facebook, SocialAds, and Privacy (Nov 18, 2007)
Facebook Mulling Privacy Changes, But Will It Be Sufficient? (Nov 29, 2007)
Facebook Changes Beacon to How it Should Have Been Designed in the First Place (Nov 29, 2007)
Dear Facebook, Google: Please Engage in Value-Conscious Design (Dec 2, 2007)
Facebook Beacon Worse than Most Thought (And Still Is) (Dec 2, 2007)
Facebook Apologizes (Sorta); Creates Global Opt-Out (Supposedly) (Dec 6, 2007)
The Illusion of “Private” Web Content (Jan 24, 2008)
Real Questions for Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer (April 6, 2008)
Facebook *Really* Wants You to Use Beacon (Sept 19, 2008)
Facebook’s Zuckerberg on Increasing the Streams of Personal Information Online (Nov 8, 2008)
Do You Trust This Face? GQ on Mark Zuckerberg (Nov 18, 2008)
On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information (Except When Facebook Does) (Feb 16, 2009)
Facebook Recants (Again) (Feb 18, 2009)
Stutzman’s Suggestions for Facebook to Properly Address User Rights (Feb 19, 2009)
Facebook’s Attempt at Open Governance (Feb 26, 2009)
Yes, Privacy Does Still Exist in a Facebook World (March 8, 2009)
Photo Finder: Automated Facial Recognition on Facebook (March 25, 2009)
Facebook Hires ACLU Privacy Lawyer, Might Actually Address Privacy (March 29, 2009)
The Laws of Social Networking: Promote Open Flows of Information, Make Privacy Hard (June 13, 2009)
Facebook’s New Privacy Paradigm: Boon or Bust? (Dec 3, 2009)
Facebook’s New Privacy Settings to Launch Today (Dec 9, 2009)`
Facebook’s Privacy Upgrade is a Downgrade for User Privacy (Dec 10, 2009)
Facebook Provides Some Control of Friends List Visibility, But Hides It (Dec 12, 2009)
NPR: Groups Complain To FTC About Facebook Changes (Jan 4, 2010)
Zuckerberg’s Remarks Aren’t Surprising, Nor New, Nor True (Jan 12, 2010)
Yet Again, Facebook Misunderstands Privacy (March 29, 2010)
Another Facebook Exec Talks About Privacy; Another Set of Gross Misunderstandings (May 12, 2010)
Facebook’s Zuckerberg: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (May 14, 2010)
Facebook (and others) Shares Identifiable Information with Advertisers (May 21, 2010)
If Only Mark Zuckerberg Would Listen to Himself (May 21, 2010)
Science Friday: Protecting Your Privacy On Social Networking Sites (May 24, 2010)
My Visceral Reaction to Zuckerberg’s Op-Ed (May 26, 2010)
True to Form, Facebook Backtracks, Promises Users More Control (some new, and some we used to have) (May 26, 2010)
OpEd: How to Win Friends and Manipulate People (June 2, 2010)
Baym: Facebook’s Views on Privacy are “Fundamentally Naive and Utopian” (June 2, 2010)
Facebook Places Privacy Falls Short: Non-Authorized Check-Ins by Friends are Visible (Aug 20, 2010)
Facebook Places Privacy Falls Short, Part 2: Opting-Out (Aug 25, 2010)
Washington Post Essay: Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of privacy (Feb 6, 2014)

New Books in the Information Society Series: “Protecting Children Online?” and “Authors, Users, and Pirates”

Michael Zimmer — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 19:37:18 +0000

Two new books have just been published in the “Information Society Series” at MIT Press that I co-edit with Laura DeNardis. Congrats to Tijana Milosevic and James Meese on these great contributions!

Protecting Children Online? Cyberbullying Policies of Social Media Companies

By Tijana Milosevic
Foreword by Sonia Livingstone

Overview

High-profile cyberbullying cases often trigger exaggerated public concern about children’s use of social media. Large companies like Facebook respond by pointing to their existing anti-bullying mechanisms or coordinate with nongovernmental organizations to organize anti-cyberbullying efforts. Do these attempts at self-regulation work? In this book, Tijana Milosevic examines the effectiveness of efforts by social media companies—including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram—to rein in cyberbullying by young users. Milosevic analyzes the anti-bullying policies of fourteen major social media companies, as recorded in companies’ corporate documents, draws on interviews with company representatives and e-safety experts, and details the roles of nongovernmental organizations examining their ability to provide critical independent advice. She draws attention to lack of transparency in how companies handle bullying cases, emphasizing the need for a continuous independent evaluation of effectiveness of companies’ mechanisms, especially from children’s perspective. Milosevic argues that cyberbullying should be viewed in the context of children’s rights and as part of the larger social problem of the culture of humiliation.

Milosevic looks into five digital bullying cases related to suicides, examining the pressures on the social media companies involved, the nature of the public discussion, and subsequent government regulation that did not necessarily address the problem in a way that benefits children. She emphasizes the need not only for protection but also for participation and empowerment—for finding a way to protect the vulnerable while ensuring the child’s right to participate in digital spaces.

About the Author
Tijana Milosevic is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo.

Authors, Users, and Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity

By James Meese

Overview

In current debates over copyright law, the author, the user, and the pirate are almost always invoked. Some in the creative industries call for more legal protection for authors; activists and academics promote user rights and user-generated content; and online pirates openly challenge the strict enforcement of copyright law. In this book, James Meese offers a new way to think about these three central subjects of copyright law, proposing a relational framework that encompasses all three. Meese views authors, users, and pirates as interconnected subjects, analyzing them as a relational triad. He argues that addressing the relationships among the three subjects will shed light on how the key conceptual underpinnings of copyright law are justified in practice.

Meese presents a series of historical and contemporary examples, from nineteenth-century cases of book abridgement to recent controversies over the reuse of Instagram photos. He not only considers the author, user, and pirate in terms of copyright law, but also explores the experiential element of subjectivity—how people understand and construct their own subjectivity in relation to these three subject positions. Meese maps the emergence of the author, user, and pirate over the first two centuries of copyright’s existence; describes how regulation and technological limitations turned people from creators to consumers; considers relational authorship; explores practices in sampling, music licensing, and contemporary art; examines provisions in copyright law for user-generated content; and reimagines the pirate as an innovator.

About the Author
James Meese is a Lecturer in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney

Seeking Postdoctoral Research Associate to Join PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research

Michael Zimmer — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 17:11:19 +0000

I am hiring a Postdoctoral Research Assistant to work on the PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research project! This is a 12-month position, with possible renewal for a 2nd year. Details below. Please join us!

Position: Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Project: PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Michael Zimmer

The School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is accepting applications for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to work with Dr. Michael Zimmer on the NSF-funded PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research project (https://pervade.umd.edu/).

The position will be under the supervision of Dr. Michael Zimmer, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Information Policy Research. Along with continuing their own research agenda, the Postdoctoral Research Associate will work alongside Dr. Zimmer and other PERVADE team members to pursue various aspects of the larger project, including empirical investigations of computational researchers working with pervasive data sets, user communities impacted by pervasive data, and regulators responding to ethical issues with big data research.

The postdoctoral position is designed for recent PhDs who are engaged in research on data ethics, internet research ethics, or other areas aligned with the objectives of the PERVADE project. Recent PhDs in information ethics & policy, critical information studies, internet studies, social media, and digital privacy are also encouraged to apply. Experience with empirical methods is required; experience with either qualitative or quantitative methods of inquiry is welcome. Ideal candidates will have a strong publication record and demonstrated success working on teams.

The postdoc is a full-time, 12-month position starting August 20, 2018, with possible renewal for a 2nd year. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will receive a salary of USD $48,900 per year plus benefits, access to travel funds, and office space in the Center for Information Policy Research. The stipend and benefits eligibility are subject to UW System policies.

Applicants who do not yet hold a PhD but expect to have it by August 2018 will be asked to provide a letter from their home institution corroborating the degree award schedule. Verification of completion of degree will be required before the start date.

Applications should include a letter of interest, CV, a writing sample, and the name and contact information of three references. All materials should be sent in a single PDF file to Dr. Michael Zimmer (zimmerm@uwm.edu) by April 1, 2018.

For more information, please contact Dr. Michael Zimmer (zimmerm@uwm.edu).

UWM is an AA/EEO Employer

Announcing the Web Science 2018 Ethics Workshop

Michael Zimmer — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 14:57:14 +0000

Along with my co-organizers, Charles Ess and Anja Bechmann, I’m excited to announce the Web Science 2018 Ethics Workshop: “Confronting Ethical Challenges in Web Science Research“, scheduled for Sunday 27 May 2018 at VU Amsterdam.

This half-day workshop, organized by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Ethics Working Group in partnership with the PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics project, will foster community engagement with the ethical challenges faced by web science researchers working with big data sources, including from social media platforms, health apps, internet of things, and related pervasive data sets.

The growing prevalence of data-rich networked information technologies, such as the internet of things, wearable devices, ubiquitous sensing, and social sharing platforms, brings a similar increase in the flow of rich, deep, and often identifiable personal information. These data flows— across devices, platforms, and between users—are increasingly available to computational and web science researchers to capture and process to discover new insights about how all these domains intersect. The growth in the scale, scope, speed, and depth of data-intensive computational activities, however, requires that we continuously confront the ethical frameworks and assumptions that guide web science research agenda now, and in the future.

Please read our call for papers and workshop schedule for more information.

Funded PhD Position to Join PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research

Michael Zimmer — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 18:16:45 +0000

[Note: this PhD position is no longer available. See recent posting for a Postdoctoral Research Associate here]

Are you a graduate student interested in big data, data ethics, internet research, or internet research ethics?

Are you looking for a funded PhD opportunity to explore these issues?

Then, join me at UW-Milwaukee to work on the PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research project! Details for this fully-funded PhD research assistant position are below.

Application deadline for the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies PhD program is January 15, 2018.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
School of Information Studies

Project: PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Michael Zimmer

Funding Opportunity: Graduate Research Assistant
Funding Details: 50% annual appointment (includes monthly stipend, tuition remission, eligible for benefits, access to travel funding; renewable for up to 4 years)

The School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee invites applications for an incoming Ph.D. student with interests in data ethics, information ethics, or internet research ethics to work with Dr. Michael Zimmer on the NSF-funded PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research project (https://pervade.umd.edu/). Students interested in information policy, critical information studies, internet studies, social media, and digital privacy are also encouraged to apply.

The incoming student will be under the supervision of Dr. Michael Zimmer, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Information Policy Research. Among the student’s responsibilities will be to assist Dr. Zimmer in various aspects of the PERVADE project, including project management activities, supervising undergraduate assistants, data collection, coding and analysis, and other tasks as assigned. The student will also assist with literature reviews, manuscript preparation, and dissemination of results, including conference presentations and publication opportunities.

The incoming student will be funded on a 50% annual Research Assistant appointment (renewable for up to four years), which includes tuition remission, a monthly stipend (including summer), and eligibility for university benefits. Full details of UW-Milwaukee graduate assistant policies are available at http://uwm.edu/graduateschool/graduate-assistant-policies-procedures/. The student will also have the opportunity to access funds for conference travel and related research expenses, and integrate with the broader PhD student cohort at the School of Information Studies.

Interested students must apply directly to the Ph.D. Program in Information Studies, and in their cover letter should (1) specifically indicate they are applying for the PERVADE graduate research assistant position, and (2) demonstrate their fit for the project. Students should also contact Dr. Michael Zimmer directly at zimmerm@uwm.edu to indicate they are applying for the PERVADE research assistant position. Applicants must meet Graduate School requirements plus SOIS requirements to be considered for admission to the Ph.D. program. Application deadline is January 15, 2018.

Additional information about the Ph.D. program in in Information Studies can be found at http://uwm.edu/informationstudies/academics/doctoral/, and application requirements are available at http://uwm.edu/informationstudies/academics/doctoral/phd/?target=admission.